Wireless Networks for Electric Utilities: A Paper in Collaboration with Lockard & White
Chester Energy & Policy worked closely with telecommunication infrastructure leader Lockard & White in crafting a piece of thought leadership designed to guide the next few years of thinking about how power companies can and should be looking at their wireless communication systems.
The resulting paper, entitled ‘Wireless Networks for Electric Utilities,’ was published and is already making waves in both the electric utility sector and the world of telecommunications.
Below you’ll find the beginning of the paper, followed by a link where you can read the rest:
Adapting your wireless network
The electric utility industry today is among the most rapidly evolving industry sectors. New technologies, new priorities and evolving regulatory requirements all contribute to increasing pressure to accommodate new applications and demands that can only be enabled with updated and expanded wireless communications networks. It is critical for utility leaders to stay ahead of the ongoing changes by building a foundation today that meets the expectations and opportunities of an evolving tomorrow, without compromising the commitment to reliability.
Electric utilities have always been charged with the awesome responsibility of keeping the lights on, no matter what. Customers experience inconvenience when Netflix fails, but they potentially suffer from catastrophe when a critical grid fails. Because of that reality, utilities cannot take risks that put their commitment of reliably delivering energy to homes and businesses in jeopardy. When new technologies are deployed, they must perform reliably, even under extreme conditions.
Much has been written about private LTE (PLTE) as the preferred wireless network solution, and for good reasons including capacity, security, and a massive ecosystem of devices and support due to its compatibility with international standards, just to name a few. Those reasons and others make a very compelling argument for PLTE as the right broadband solution for electric utilities, so it’s not difficult to understand why some have already begun designing and deploying those networks with more surely to follow. PLTE is a great solution for utilities, but given their differences due to factors such as ownership model (IOU, municipality or cooperative) density of meters, size of the operating area, spectrum options and availability, does it make sense for all of them?
While we believe all utilities should evaluate PLTE, we also know that the operational and business realities of some, along with the current landscape of options, don’t fit within the constraints all utilities must consider. Many cannot justify or afford to purchase, build, and operate a PLTE network across their entire operating area. For the ones that can’t, will they be left behind, unable to support industry advancements, or is there another path to the future for them? There are other options besides PLTE, and for some power providers, alternatives to PLTE may be better for reasons relating to applications needed, cost and other factors. In some cases, the savvy move may be a hybrid approach that embraces a combination of narrowband and wideband networks to deliver the required wireless results. This paper will describe an approach which we term Heterogeneous Spectrum Layering designed to help those utility network planners understand the traditional options available in an ever-changing environment.
Heterogeneous Spectrum Layering is an approach that maximizes the value of existing investments while building a path to the future and allows utilities to augment existing investments to expand and extend current wireless networks. It is a strategy that can be used for increasing data throughput for a growing number of field data devices by adding network capacity and maintaining the current investment in traditional narrowband systems, when broadband PLTE isn’t the right fit today, but may be in the future. In this way, utilities can make forward-looking investments incrementally to reliably support the need for higher capacity wireless networks and continue to benefit from investments in their valuable assets of narrowband and wideband systems.